


blue skies over bad lands

by rattlingbones



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abigail Hobbs Lives, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-24 13:52:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8374555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rattlingbones/pseuds/rattlingbones
Summary: It's funny how a lot of little changes can make a person appear unrecognizable.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Allekha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allekha/gifts).



In college she goes by Gail and changes her last name completely. She dyes her hair buttery blond and grows it long and wavy. She gets her nose pierced with a little cubic zirconia stud like Marissa always wanted to get in hers. She tries to tan but mostly becomes even more freckled. She switches to darker shades of lipstick and finally learns how to draw on eyeliner.

She wears chokers, always--it's too warm for scarves in Phoenix. Her freshman year roommate snickers a little and makes snide comments about the 90's. Gail ignored her at first, and then one day the girl makes says something when Gail's in exactly the wrong mood. Gail lifts an eyebrow (carefully dyed to match her hair at a salon just off campus) and looks long and deep at her. _You have no idea_ , she thinks, _the things I have done, the things I can do, the things I can do to you_. Her roommate backs off after that. They both put in requests for new roommates at the end of the first semester.

It's funny how a lot of little changes can make a person appear unrecognizable. It's funny how no matter how much someone appears to change they're always who they've always been if you look hard enough.

When anyone asks where she's from she's vague. When anyone asks about her family she's silent.

She has to work full time and be a student full time, which is exhausting but a good sort of exhausting. She doesn't have time to dream or dwell in the past. When she gets back to her dorm room at the end of the day she collapses and its glorious to wake up having slept so deeply she is unable to remember her dreams.

 She's undeclared for all of freshman year and the summer semester. She dabbles. In high school she had liked mathematics: all those neat formulas and elegant answers. Problems she could always solve. Her math courses in college are different, though. They're mostly computer-based and mind-numbing. Instead, her favorite course freshman year turns out to be the 1000 level physical anthropology class she took because it filled a distribution requirement and didn't meet at 8 a.m. on a Friday.

So one bright morning in September she walks across campus to the registrar's office and registers herself as an archaeology major.

She throws herself into her studies with renewed zeal. She's chosen her path. And nobody and nothing is going to take it away from her.

In the spring, one of her professors pulls her aside after class and presses a flyer into her hands. The professor smiles nervously under Gail's scrutiny, explaining that there's an archaeological dig in the summer with places available for undergraduates, and if Gail's interested she'll write her a reference. Gail accepts.

It's hot, merciless work out in dry badlands. What little flora exists look like bleached bones. The excavation team have generator powered fans but they're hardly useful.

She burns, burns, burns. She slathers herself nightly in drugstore aloe vera. It makes little difference, but to be honest, she doesn't care.  

Most of the others complain of boredom at some point, even the actual archaeologists, but she finds a kind of pleasure in it. It's about patience, and attention, and meticulousness. She's dusty and sweaty and burning all the time but she enjoys the hunt. (She wonders, sometimes, if this is how her dad felt.)

In the lull of the darkest morning hours she pulls on her fleece and crawls out of her tent to stare at the stars. It reminds her of Minnesota, sort of. At least the lack of light pollution out in the country. In Phoenix she can barely ever see the stars.

The night she wanders off it isn't for any particular reason. She's done it a few times before: snuck out of camp for no other reason than to be as far from everyone else in the world as she can be. She doesn't have a reason for walking away that particular night. She just goes. She takes her compass, her water bottle, and a flashlight and walks due north for an hour, for a minute, for an eternity.

She only stops when she notices the pile a little way off to her right.

It's not rocks, nor the odd grass and bramble that grows here. She deviates from her path to approach and stand over the body. Because that's what it is: a body.

It's desiccated from the elements and flesh partially stripped away by carrion animals. Hardly even looks human anymore. The head and hands are missing. Gail's guessing the person didn't die of natural causes. 

She thinks she ought to feel shock, revulsion, but instead she thinks: _what a waste_ and _they should've honored every part_. 

She stands over the body for a long, long time.

Then Abigail Hobbs turns and follows her footprints and compass back to the excavation site. 


End file.
